When I flew into Portland for RailsConf I walked down to Dante's to get some pizza and beer right after checking into my hotel. When I walked into the mostly empty early evening bar I noticed a spotlight on a mannequin holding a hula hoop. While waiting for my pizza slice I realized it wasn't a mannequin, it was a semi nude model surround by a handful of artists with sketch pads. Turned out that they were selling pads and pencils at the door for $5. Since I had a few hours to kill and had never tried figure drawing before I decided to give it a shot.
The first one is really crappy, but after 90 minutes (and a few beers) I think I showed a lot of improvement. Yes, still not good, but come on, look at that first one! I think that's they key with people who are good sketchers: it's not that there is necessarily some natural talent that one either has or doesn't have, it's that they do it all the time and just get better and better at it.
By the way, those are feathers on her pasties, not tassels (some folks I showed these to were confused by that).
The news has broken that Pivotal Labs has taken on the task of fixing Twitter's notorious performance problems, or as the VentureBeat article described it "Twitter brings in big guns from Pivotal Labs to help rebuild its troubled infrastructure". I think this is a smart move for Twitter. During my two years at Pivotal I was constantly impressed by the level of engineering excellence exhibited there. It was by far the smartest group of software engineers I had ever worked with and the highest quality of code I've ever had a hand in producing. I truly believe they are the best Ruby on Rails shop you can find anywhere. That's why now that I've left Pivotal to lead the engineering effort of a web startup, I'm back at Pivotal as a client. I know where to go for excellence, and apparently so does Twitter. I'm really looking forward to seeing this team crush the Twitter issue.
Note, depiction is not necessarily the actual Twitter team at Pivotal, but they are some of my favorite Big Guns there :)
[dav:~] $ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
128 ruby
75 cd
57 ls
35 rm
25 sudo
13 rake
10 vi
10 ssh
9 ping
8 cat